Yesterday I held a seminar about web 2.0 at Hela kyrkans hemsida in Stockholm, an event for people from all kinds of christian churches who are interested in the web. During and after the seminar I got a few questions that I want to share here as well.

General questions:

Q: What’s the thing with Twitter? You can just write 140 signs. That’s just nothing.

A: Don’t think about Twitter like that. About how little you can share. Think about how much you can get out of Twitter. When you start following people who share things your are interested in, you will see that Twitter is a goldmine. Also, most people have time to read 140 signs so alot more people will read your tweet than your blog post of 1400 signs.

Q: But how do you get people to follow you on Twitter?

A: Listen to others and they will start listening to you. You choose to follow people because you find them interesting, soon you will start to interact with them and they will most likely follow you back.

Q: Doesn’t the things you talk about go deeper than the actual web? We can’t keep on doing as we always have done in the church with the sermons as they always have been.

A: Exactly. That’s what I said in the beginning of my seminar and also showed in the Youtube movie clip. We need to rethink most things in life, of course also the church. The churches need to think about how to make services and sermons more interactive. And how to share them on the web.

Q: If I want to start up a new charity organization and advertise it through social media. How do I do?

A: There are alot of things you can do but this is how I would start: Start with making a blog. Write about the questions that are important for your organization. Use links to news articles and other blogs about these questions to get trackback links back to your blog. Make a Facebook fan page, let the RSS-feed from your blog be published on your fan page to give it content. Also add a Facebook fan page widget to your blog so that your readers can see that you are on Facebook as well. Charity works pretty good on Facebook so it should be pretty easy to get some fans. When you have got a fan base, join Twitter if your fans are there. Cause if they are they will most likely help you to share your message through Twitter as well. This is a start, the rest is individual and developed over time.

I also got a few personal questions:

Q: Why does an 8 year old kid (me back in the days) sit in front of a computer and write code?

A: I have all my life been interested in things connected to engineering. When I was a kid I liked to solve jigsaws, play with Lego, Briomec and cars. In the house there was also a Commodore64 and a book about programming in Basic. One day I just copied some code from the book to make a simple program. And then I started to analyze the code and realized that if I change the value of some variables, the program behaved in other ways. It’s just as easy as that, 8 year old girls don’t have to play with dolls.

Q: You said that you are a webjunkie and live your life through the web. What do you actually mean with that?

I got this question when we had lunch and here is where I picked up my iPhone and checked in at the restaurant with Gowalla and said:

A: I mean like this. Right now it will be known at at least four websites that I am at this restaurant. If anyone who notices it is in the neighbourhood they can come by and say hi. But this is only a part of it. I read the Twitterfeed as soon as I got a free minute or two and share things with my followers if I feel like I have something to share. I check my RSS-reader several times a day to see if my favorite blogs are updated. And I share things I am interested in, with others on the web all the time.

Q: Don’t you get stressed when living your life like that?

A: No, not since it’s so natural for me. I could cut it all off for a day if I want but that would be to strangle my life since everything I do is done through the web. That would probably make me more stressed. Most of my friends are connected to the web in the same way which means that afk-life and web-life isn’t separated for me. It’s all one life. My life. I am addicted to the Internet but I also want to be. Like you are addicted to your cellphone for example to be able to call your friends.

I probably got more questions… that I don’t remember. But I hope I answered them well on site.